Reversed
by Words Make the Story
Summary: We all know that everyone's favorite infantry soldier of the stars has been harboring a crush almost as massive as his Sergeant's hubris on a certain bubblegum-haired pekoponian for years now, but have you ever thought of what it would be like... if it were the other way around? AU.


**Valentine's Day. For those of you who can read a calendar or Wikipedia, you know that every 14th of February it rolls around. Gifts with deeper meaning attached like their name tags are passed about like a beach ball at a stadium, romance permeates the air like that of the smoke and smells that once poured out from the chimney of Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, and... well... look, you get the damn picture, right?**

The school bell rang loudly throughout the Kissho Academy, allowing its students the much anticipated permission to surge forth from the building like albino bats out of hell. Its prized prodigy, Natsumi Hinata, was among them, and, like her fellow students, was eager to escape its halls.

_'I can do this.' _she thought to herself, glancing down at the box shaped in the stylized image of the muscular organ which maintained the circulation of blood, trying to summon the courage to present it to the person who was closest to her own.

She quickened her pace to a jog. It was a peculiar feeling, to say the least; she wanted to get to him as quickly as possible, but was also so nervous, she wished the run would last forever.

The sparkling eyes deeper and of a shade bluer than the ocean itself that rested in the skull of Mutsumi Saburo found their way to the figure of the boy's cotton candy hair colored classmate (if she could even be considered such, seeing as how he only dropped by school two or three times a year, tops) approaching him, and he shot her that signature tender yet suave smile of his. "Hey, Natsumi." he greeted. "Want to go on a walk-?"

"Sorry, not now, Saburo!" she absentmindedly declined, speeding past the boy with greater speed than usual.

"She _never _pays any attention to me." the silver-haired teen dejectedly sighed, shoving his hands into his pockets and sadly sauntering away.

After much sprinting, Natsumi finally reached her destination. She bent over to catch her breath, and ran her sleeve over her glistening brow, before her eyes suddenly widened with horror at the damp smear left behind. _'Oh, damn it!'_, her mind wailed, _'I'm all sweaty now! I can't let him see my body performing one of its basic functions!'_

Running up to the door, she pulled out the key from under the mat and headed on in. She dashed up the stairs, and stepped into her room, pulling out a few clothes from her dresser. She then headed into the bathroom, locked the door, and made sure to smash the hidden camera that that perv Kululu had placed in there. Finishing the routine, she stripped down to her birthday suit (thank goodness I'm only writing this - pixelization isn't exactly in the budget), took a relaxing five minute shower, dried off, and changed into her leisure wear.

She grabbed the box she had placed on the sink, and raced downstairs into the kitchen, but came to a screeching halt at the sliding glass door. She pressed her face up against it, longingly gazing out at the backyard.

There he was.

The Corporal of the ARMPIT platoon, the one who bore the three most sigh-inducing and heart melting syllables of anyone across the entire macrocosm.

Giroro.

While, at first, the feelings she began to have about him shortly after they met confused her deeply, once they became too powerful, she eventually admitted to herself that she had fallen in love with the alien amphibian. She would be lying if she said her mind didn't spend most of its time turning to him. A silly, besotted grin spread across her face like a glob of butter upon a piece of toast in the palm of a greedy glutton as she thought about how cute, yet so virile, the little Earth invader was, and it didn't take long for said thoughts to turn into fantasies of the two locked together in passionate embraces. But just as quickly as she had immersed herself in them, she tore herself out. Now was neither the time nor place.

As she gripped the door's handle, her body once again became drenched with perspiration. _'Whoops, damn diaphoresis. Better go wash up again.' _she nervously thought, scampering out of the kitchen, before stopping herself dead in her tracks. _'No! It's time to grow a pair!... Figuratively, of course. Oh, God... Kululu, if you're sporting that telepath helmet today, you better not get any ideas, lest you want your laugh forever silenced by it being rammed down your scrawny little neck. I am in _no_ mood to endure another metamorphosis into a Y chromosomer.'_

Putting aside her possibly nonexistent conversation, she walked back into the kitchen, and in no time flat was trembling with nervousness from head to toe once more. She managed to muster up the courage to go back up to the sliding door. Okay, that was good. She gripped its handle. Okay, she was doing great. She slowly, but surely, slid it open. All she needed to do now was to walk over to him. _'Come on, feet, MOVE!' _she inwardly commanded.

"Hey there, kid." she heard the gruff voice of her secret love say. Her head shot up. The Corporal was sitting beside his campfire, polishing his guns, as was his custom, with a cigar the color of a lily pad hanging from his lips. She guessed from its odd color that it was either a double claro or, much more likely, not of this world, considering its smoker.

"H-Hey G-Giroro." she stammered like a child in the presence of a policeman as she walked up to him, quickly hiding the gift behind her back. She hovered by him nervously, until he decided to speak up.

"You know, you could sit down, if you want." he suggested, his eyes darting over to the space beside him.

"Oh, um, sure." she said, now wracked with even more nerves. As she placed her bottom upon the adjacent cinder block, he let his firearm leave his hand and rest upon nature's carpet, replacing it with a small appendage fallen from one of the many of the celestial body's oxygen producers, on which ran through the only thing she had a love for that ran as deep as the one for its holder.

"Sweet potato?" he offered.

"Yes, please!" she accepted, a bit too eagerly. The frog put it over the fire, taking a long drag on his cigar as he did so - but making sure to blow the smoke away from her direction. Enthralled by the dancing flames caressing the potato, he was unaware of Natsumi's peripheral stare. "My god, your scar's sexy..." she longingly muttered to herself.

"_What?_" he asked, his eyebrows jumping a mile into the air as he very nearly choked on his cigar. _Did she just say...?_

Natsumi's cheeks went redder than a hot stove coil. How could she let that slip out!? "Nothing!" she lied. Giroro gave her a dubious look, before shrugging and turning his attention back to her meal.

This was a bad idea. What was she thinking!? As if he'd ever except such an emasculating gift, anyway! She needed to abort the plan. "You know what, Giroro?"

"Hmmmm?"

"As much as I love your sweet potatoes, I'm not very hungry right now." she lied, getting up and slowly backing away, all the while making sure not to let him catch a glimpse of his gift.

"Oh", he said, trying in vain to hide the disappointment lacing his voice, "That's a shame. I actually kind of... enjoy... eating them with you."

"You do?" Natsumi asked, her face emitting enough heat to melt a glacier. He nodded. "M-Me t-too! T-Totally!" she stuttered, before planting herself back down in her seat.

The Corporal gazed at the pigtailed pekoponian. He would have never thought that a being apart of the race he was assigned to conquer would end up, in an ironic twist of fate, a comrade to him, in all senses of the word, save for the fact that she was the biggest obstacle in their path of glorious global subjugation (well... that and their incompetence). But, while he would never voice it, not even to himself, he did hold a certain degree of obeisance towards her for her fierce planetary patriotism. All things considered, he might even say she was his 'BFF', if that wasn't so damn girly. Turning her head towards his, she locked eyes with the crimson, pint-sized extraterrestrial who had stolen her heart, and a sheepish smile slid onto her face. Giroro grinned back. Despite her exterior, the girl was truly a warrior.

"So, um... you know, today is a pekoponian holiday..." she spoke up.

"Yeah, I know", said Giroro, giving a slight roll of the eyes, "Can you believe it? A whole day centered on _romance_. My frog. The only thing that's even remotely salvageable about it is the killer baby with the arrows."

Like the RMS Titanic on the clear and calm night of April 15th, Natsumi's heart sank. "So, you don't like this holiday?"

"Well... I'm a warrior, Natsumi. And a warrior is not a lover."

Natsumi hung her head in disappointment, but made it look as if she was just staring at something on her shoes. She knew that pigs sprouting wings and soaring through the sky like chubby cherubs was a more likely possibility than her and Giroro ending up together, but she had always held onto to a glimmer of hope that maybe, against all odds, they would. But now she knew for sure that she was just chasing a pipe dream.

"But, hey..." the Corporal then killed the silence as he had unknowingly her hope. "... Who knows? Maybe someday, that homicidal infant will be able to pierce me, and I'll end up falling head-over-heels for some poor dame after all." he chuckled.

A smile resurfacing at this, she slowly removed the box from behind her back. "Hey, Giroro... In the spirit of the holiday, I got you a... well, I guess you could call it a gift. You know, just to mark the occasion and whatnot. It's nothing much, really... but... would you care to accept it?"

Giroro eyed the container for a few moments, rolling his cigar back and forth between his lips, before giving a little shrug. "Sure. Thanks." he answered. Natsumi placed it by his feet, blushing furiously again. It soon transferred into his palms and fell under the gaze of his downcast eyes, where it awakened a memory long thought to be lost in the inaccessible recesses of his mind. Four words were then spoken from the most undetectable of smirks...

"'Keroro brand Ikinari Dumplings'..."

"Production resumed for one final time when fridiot's website got its first - and only - order..."

"You know, the last time one of these touched my tongue, my stomach ruptured."

God, she had hoped all that morphine would've made his remembrance a bit hazy about that part. Trying to defuse the tension - not to mention guilt - that the comment left lingering behind, she forced a chuckle and joked "Guess you have a bit of closet sweet tooth after all, huh?"

Face remaining stoic, he replied with "You know what this means, don't you?"

**Five hundred yen says he tosses it into the fire, ten says he perforates it with lead.**

"It means...", he continued, removing the lid to reveal its doughy contents, "... That, in order to avoid a repeat of the wrath of these savory little mouth stuffers, you're going to stay out here and eat them with me."

It took tremendously strong will for Natsumi not to faint at what was just required of her. "Be more than happy to..." she dreamily replied.

And the two stayed out there together, long throughout the night.

And, as far as she was concerned, it was the best Valentine's Day she ever had.


End file.
